Students' opinions on the educational value of physics laboratories: a cross-sectional survey

Physics laboratories are currently under pressure to reform due to the growing evidence that students are not learning effectively in the lab. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on what the most important goals for the laboratories should be or how to implement them. With the overall value and purpose of physics laboratories in question, we have set out to determine the opinions of the students themselves. How valuable do students perceive physics labs to be, what skills do they learn the most in the lab, and what kinds of lab technologies do they prefer? We accomplished this through a nationwide cross-sectional online survey of physics majors, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, receiving responses from a total of 445 students from 20 different Canadian universities. The present survey shows that students recognize the usefulness of many laboratory aspects. However, despite the best intentions of educators, there are a few components that students do not find as useful.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author